1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a failure prediction notification printer and a printer management server, a failure prediction notification system employing them, a failure prediction notification program and a failure prediction notification method in which a failure occurrence time is concretely predicted from the service situations of individual printers connected to a network, so as to notify the prediction to users.
2. Background Art
In general, equipment for business use, such as printers, copying machines and facsimiles, often exert serious influence on business due to the occurrence of unexpected failures or troubles.
Therefore, many manufacturers which provide the equipment repeat various tests and improvements and endeavor to thoroughly exclude the causes of the failures and troubles before sales.
In actuality, however, the elimination of the failures and troubles is extremely difficult in relation to unforeseen uses, the years of endurances of the equipment themselves, etc.
It is accordingly reasonable to handle such equipment on the assumption that the failures and troubles will inevitably occur in the future. A recent theme has shifted to how the time at which a failure is considered to actually occur, and the contents of the failure are precisely predicted by immediately acquiring the information of the failures and troubles and making the factors of the occurrences clear.
In, for example, JP-A-8-23408, JP-A-2001-216423, and JP-A-2002-312027, there has been proposed a method wherein a printer and a server are connected by a network, printer information items such as the number of print copies and a turn-ON time period are acquired from the printer through the network, and a high degree of processing is executed on the basis of the acquired printer information by the computer or the like of the server, thereby to perform the precise failure prediction.
Meanwhile, in such a method hitherto proposed, in order to notify a user of a failure prediction result obtained by the computer or the like, the printer needs to include dedicated display means such as an LCD display.
Therefore, the method cannot be applied to a conventional printer which does not include such dedicated display means. For sharing in the benefit of the method, it is necessary to prepare the dedicated display means or to purchase anew the printer including the display means, resulting in the drawback that the cost of introduction becomes high.
Accordingly, the present invention has been made in order to effectively solve such a problem, and an object is to provide a novel failure prediction notification printer and printer management server, failure prediction notification system employing them, failure prediction notification program and failure prediction notification method according to which the occurrence time, contents, etc. of a failure can be reliably notified to printer users, and others without employing dedicated display means such as an LCD display.